House budget chief Rep. Jim Pitts quipped Monday that he’s troubled — even at night — by arcane features of Texas’ two-year state budget.

“I know it’s bad when I dream about spending limits. And that’s what I did last night,” Pitts said, referring to a state constitutional cap on spending.

It may require lawmakers to leave money unspent this session — if GOP legislative leaders shy from putting a bill to “bust the cap” before their colleagues.

It only takes a majority vote in both chambers to do that. Technically, it’d be a vote to raise the rate of projected personal income growth for the next two years. That guess, applied to a certain subset of state spending of non-dedicated state tax dollars, spits out a number that for the next two years becomes the limit on that subset of state spending.

Suffice it to say that almost no one, beyond the Legislative Budget Board staff, actually grasps what is and isn’t covered by the spending cap.

However, it’s become symbolic in recent years. Some statewide GOP leaders and many of the tea party-backed newcomers to the Republican caucuses in both the House and the Senate have criticized the current cap as too elastic. They say using personal income growth lets spending rise too fast. They want to substitute the sum of the rates of inflation and population growth. Defenders of the current cap say incomes reflect gains in economic productivity, and that just counting bodies and inflation unwisely chokes off revenue to a state struggling to keep up with rapid growth and imposing challenges, such as taking an inordinate number of low-income children and connecting them to a high-wage future.

Pitts, R-Waxahachie, has a lot of new members on his Appropriations Committee this session.

He kicked off a quickie seminar on “budget cost drivers” by inviting experts to discuss a) how much money budget writers will have to spend; and b) how much Medicaid and public schools will cost.